Editing While Female

Over the weekend, I had a long dinner in Paris with a close friend from our days together as foreign correspondents in Moscow. Natalie Nougayrède had gone on to become the first woman editor-in-chief and director of Le Monde, a post to which she was elected, in the paper’s tradition, little more than a year ago with a record 80 percent-plus support from the staff. She had embarked on an ambitious transformation plan to unite the newsroom’s separate print and digital teams—something newspapers in the Anglophone world had done years ago. Now, the predictable trouble had materialized, and she was facing an insurrection from threatened top editors.

Just after I returned home to Washington, she quit, protesting a plan to reduce some of the top editor’s powers and writing in her resignation letter that she no longer had the “peace and serenity” required to do the tough job of running a daily newspaper. In the news coverage about her exit, reporters barely mentioned her decisive leadership in seeking to turn around an economically troubled newspaper and its hidebound ways (including paying employees for more than 13 weeks of annual vacation), instead quoting unnamed sources in the LeMonde newsroom complaining that she was “very difficult to talk to.”

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Hours later, Jill Abramson of the New York Times was unceremoniously dumped as that paper’s first woman executive editor, criticized by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for unspecified “management” shortcomings. I have long known and admired Abramson, who helped hire my husband at the Times, and had watched with dismay over the last year as any legitimate questions about her tenure were subordinated to tiresome, trite and utterly sexist debates over her “temperament” and whether it was the right one for a newsroom leader.

And sure enough this was exactly the fight that immediately erupted again on Wednesday among the commentariat about both women, a discussion that dwelled at great length on their personalities, their leadership skills and the extent to which their status as trailblazers in a male-dominated world was relevant. Even the defense—and there were many defenders—was being waged on this battlefield, the terrain of women’s personal qualities and whether they truly belong in the public positions that remain a man’s unquestioned privilege.

It was predictably awful, and I was not in the least bit surprised. Because this has happened to just about every woman I know who has dared to take up a highly visible leadership position in our great but troubled news organizations. Including me.

We like to pretend it’s different now, that Hillary Clinton really did shatter that glass ceiling into thousands of pieces. But it’s not true. There are shockingly few women at the top anywhere in America, and it’s a deficit that is especially pronounced in journalism, where women leaders remain outliers, category-defying outliers who almost invariably still face a comeuppance.

Sheryl Sandberg may be a billionaire and a bestseller, but the Facebook COO’s self-help book is not a recipe for success in this or any other field. At least not yet. All of these women in journalism, Abramson perhaps most of all, have leaned in. They paid close attention to those anxiety-producing cover stories in the Atlantic about having it all. They looked men in the eye and asked for promotions and raises (well, sorta, kinda, maybe—look what apparently happened when even someone as powerful as Abramson dared to complain upon learning that her pay was not equal to that of her male predecessor). They somehow overcame the stigma of being called “ bossy” as girls, and most of them have balanced both challenging career experiences and raising children at home. They did not lack in confidence—or at least figured out how to project it, even when they weren’t in fact entirely feeling it. In short, these women editors have done most of the things the professional women’s empowerment class recommends.

But still, they were not really able to succeed. They—and I—remained stuck in a trap not of our own making. It’s called editing while female.

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I should start by saying this is an article I never wanted to write. I never wanted it to be about me. Or about being a woman. I considered myself so lucky and privileged to make a career in journalism even—especially!—at a time of enormous change. I was an optimist, even about the Internet, killer of tradition, and I believed that the bad old days of institutionalized discrimination were mostly behind us. As for the other stuff, the lingering evidence this was not entirely the case, I just avoided it. I didn’t write about how isolated I felt as a young working mom surrounded by older men or how to run a meeting while having a miscarriage. I did not blog about the male editor who told me I shouldn’t worry about having my own slot as a Washington Post foreign correspondent alongside my husband, since I couldn’t possibly hope to be his peer as a journalist anyway. Even when I became a department head and discovered that I was paid less than all of the other senior editors at the Post, I said nothing, because after all, I was younger and I was a woman and I didn’t want it to be about that. And besides, speaking up would mean being judged. And inevitably being found wanting.

So I said nothing and considered myself privileged—if more than occasionally terrified—when I was sent off to cover the war in Afghanistan, and heard the sound of gunfire for the first time while reporting on the battle of Tora Bora. I learned Russian and traveled to Iraq and slept on a hospital roof in Basra with a team of British snipers and co-wrote a book about Vladimir Putin. I edited Roll Call, a newspaper about Congress, in my 20s. I edited the Washington Post Outlook section and ForeignPolicy magazine.